A pillar from Building D at Göbekli Tepe seen from the southeast. Credit: German Archaeological Institute (DAI)

(Phys.org)—A team of researchers with the German Archaeological Institute has found long, deliberate marks carved into ancient skulls found at the Göbekli Tepe dig site. In their paper published on the open access site Science Advances, the group describes the skull fragments they have been studying and offer some possible explanations for the markings they found.

Göbekli Tepe is the name given to an ancient temple in what is now southern Turkey—it was built approximately 11,000 years ago, during the Stone Age. Workers have been at the site for the past 20 years removing the soil covering the tall pieces of T-shaped limestone, some of which rise up to 18 feet from the ground. Thus far, researchers at the site report that it does not appear that the temple was used as living quarters, but was instead a temple where the locals gathered to perform rituals. One such ritual appears to have involved using human skulls—hundreds of them, broken into pieces, litter the areas between the limestone columns. These findings have caused researchers to label the site as evidence of one of the earliest skull cults. In this new effort, the researchers report that some of the skull pieces have been found to have lines cut into them.

The team determined that the skull fragments they found with the unique marks on them belonged to just three individuals—each had deep straight-line grooves carved into the bone and one of them also had a hole drilled through its top. The grooves were found to measure between 0.2 and 4 millimeters deep and were clearly made by a person using stone tools, rather than by another animal or other natural process. Also, it was determined that the grooves were made after the person had died—there was no bone growth suggesting natural repair. Also, it appeared likely that the grooves had been made shortly after the person had died, while the bone was still relatively elastic.

Because it is not clear why the grooves appeared only on three skulls, the researchers were left to generate theories—they believe one of the likeliest possibilities is that the grooves were made to hold cords in place while the skull was hoisted onto a pole using the drilled hole—possibly as a way to scare off enemies.

AbstractArchaeological excavations at Göbekli Tepe, a transitional Neolithic site in southeast Turkey, have revealed the earliest megalithic ritual architecture with characteristic T-shaped pillars. Although human burials are still absent from the site, a number of fragmented human bones have been recovered from fill deposits of buildings and from adjacent areas. We focus on three partially preserved human skulls, all of which carry artificial modifications of a type so far unknown from contemporaneous sites and the ethnographic record. As such, modified skull fragments from Göbekli Tepe could indicate a new, previously undocumented variation of skull cult in the Early Neolithic of Anatolia and the Levant.

Related Stories

(Phys.org)—A team of researchers with the University of Edinburgh has found what they describe as evidence of a comet striking the Earth at approximately the same time as the onset of the Younger Dryas in carvings on an ...

A nasty little 66-million-year-old family secret has been leaked by a recently unearthed tyrannosaur bone. The bone has peculiar teeth marks that strongly suggest it was gnawed by another tyrannosaur. The find could be some ...

Scientists have discovered a "well-preserved" Homo erectus skull, teeth and other skull bones at the Hualongdong archaeological site in Zhongzhi County of Anhui Province, eastern China, as announced in a news conference on ...

Recommended for you

Voters in modern democracies, such as the United States and Germany, have long held the power to take from the rich, give to the poor and erase the huge economic inequalities that separate the vast majority of a nation's ...

Police detectives analyze isotopes in human hair to find out where a murder victim was born and grew up. Ashley Sharpe, an archaeologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, and colleagues combined clues ...

A team of researchers from Korea, the U.K. and Denmark has found fossilized brains of sea creatures that lived during the Cambrian explosion. In their paper published in the journal Nature Communications, the group describes ...

Small scale agricultural farming was first initiated by indigenous communities living on Turkey's Anatolian plateau, and not introduced by migrant farmers as previously thought, according to new research by the University ...

A long-standing debate in the field of cultural evolution has revolved around the question of how and why human societies become more hierarchical. Some theorize that material changes to a society's resources or subsistence ...

Reproducibility of scientific findings has long been an important indicator of the validity of data gleaned from research, a process deemed even more critical in this age of ever-changing technologies and methods.

1 comment

Those marks look like they might be consistent with facilitating the removal of the pate by peeling it back from the apex points of the triangular incisions. In other words, deliberate retrieval of the skull for whatever macabre reason.

We are civilized now. This is what we do now, "These parts of human body are made of Japanese paper and gilded edges of old books": http://viola.bz/h...nilsson/

Please sign in to add a comment.
Registration is free, and takes less than a minute.
Read more

Click here to reset your password.
Sign in to get notified via email when new comments are made.